
The second section, entitled “Shangdu, My Artful Boomtown!” presents the fictional city in China that we are told is loosely based on modern-day Shenzhen, a place undergoing extreme, almost violently fast change. The particular appeal of the second section is in the language’s texture. This is felt most intensely in a set of prose descriptions under the title “Adventures in Shangdu.” The ten pages, mostly packed with two descriptions on a page, act as glimpses into life in Shangdu. The readers’ senses are flooded with imagery: “Vendors line the promenade … they sell pinwheels, pancakes and roast meats of all kinds, even sticks of prickly little seahorses.” The prose poems rotate around living in a “Lucky Highrise Apartment 88.” 88 is a particularly fortuitous number in Chinese; in Mandarin, the character for ‘8’ bears sound echoes of the characters that imply wealth. The poems are buoyant in tone, but what they reveal inside are suicides and death, intense surveillance of citizens in the community, the often un-humanizing social tensions caused by too-rapid industrialization and the reach of cultural imperialism:
Officials used to dump all the cripples from the Capital into Shangdu. Now that Shangdu is booming, they have rounded all the cripples and exiled them to a remote outpost up north. That outpost is also beginning to boom.
(from ”Of the Old Ukrainian Embassy That Will Be Torn Down for the Hanger Factory”)
Hong’s form of using the prose poem as flash fiction and/or film vignette is not particularly revolutionary, but it is highly effective for this section in particular, where the disconnect between humanness and humanity is most highlighted. Men are presented as interchangeable with machines, and machines are elevated to the level of man:
When Officials ignored their strike, the crane operators decided to be more aggressive. They worked all night. The next morning, train carriages, buses, limousines, bicycles, boats, and even helicopters swung lazily in the wind, magnetized by cranes. Negotiate, they cried, and we will free your vehicles.” (from ”Of the World’s Largest Multilevel Parking Garage”)
In the third section, a collection of second-person poems brings characters that peer at us eerily from the future, and though the collection is set up chronologically, moving from past to present to future, nothing is ever truly left behind. The last section sees Hong turn personalities from the first two into specters:
Lately, you’ve been fascinated by a user-generated hologram:
an ethnically ambiguous boy who pretends to drop dead from a shoot-out.
The boy wakes up when his mother comes home.
She scolds him and turns off the camera.
You blink to go offline.
Then in a later poem:
You wake up from a nap.
Your mouth feels like a cheap acrylic sweater.
You blink online and 3-D images hopscotch around you. … After your husband went on roam, you received one message from him:
I am by a pond and a coyote is eating a frog. It is amazing.
What is amazing is not the strange synesthesia of a “mouth feel[ing] like a cheap acrylic sweater” or that human beings “blink online” and go “on roam,” but that there are, in this un-real reality, still ponds, and coyotes, and frogs. What do we do with a world that is both beyond human but still operating within the simplest law of nature: survival?
Hong’s skill with wordplay and sound is admirably virtuosic; the first section’s “Ballad in A,” “Ballad in O,” and “Ballad in I” are obvious poems in which Hong’s words dance off each other with such ease it’s almost tempting to skim through them: “O Boomtown’s got lots of sordor:/ odd horrors of throwdowns,/ bold cowboys lock horns, forlorn hobos plot to rob/ pts of gold, loco mobs …” or “Marshal’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track/ calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,/ says that dastard Kansan’s had/ and gnaws fatback.” But not surprisingly, taking the time to work through the poem yields what makes much of Engine Empire appealing – the discord that lies just beneath. Reading these ballads aloud prove more difficult than tongue twister; there is something discomfiting about the way the vowels knock against each other, the way one possible sound of the vowels scrape against other possible sounds of the vowels, like each word is locking horns with the next and refusing to let go. The poems transform: the eye expects the vowel repetition to sound as pleasing as it looks, and once this is disputed by the ear (and the tongue in vocalizing the words), the jarring competition between tones, sounds, words on the page, becomes almost unbearable.
But the unbearable is effective; there is something post-human about Hong’s Engine Empire, in the descriptions of surveillance and performance, and the way the subjectivity of Hong’s poems throughout the collection refuses to be pinned down. She works "we" into "I" into "you" and back out again: “I suffer a different kind of loneliness” or “We lost a brother, axed in the head by a rancid trapper,/ so we pluck one boy from the litter.” And as Hong reminds us in “Fort Ballads” of the first section, with subjectivity, there is relationality;
“All around us forts lie built and unbuilt, half-
walled towns as men yoke themselves to state,
but we brothers are heading through fields of blue rye and plains
scullground to silt sand” (“Fort Ballads,” 19)
What of the motion from “built” to “unbuilt” to “built,” and what of the yoking when the yoking will cause us to become undone? This is the United States, and it’s the Twenty-First Century. What is engine and what is empire, and which one is at the heart of the other? Engine Empire is concerned about our collective humanity, our possession of citizen-ness and nationhood. Ownership and responsibility of actions elide; they are cast aside, ignored, and eventually, by the last section, somehow acknowledged and relegated to a minor shadow status—an uncomfortable memory no one wants to talk about, and so by not talking about it, did it happen at all? Engine Empire may simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct empire as activity as well as structure, bringing us to question what happens to our human-ness as it leads us toward the boundaries of humanity. ~AVW